On “Audience of One”, Oren Ambarchi presents a four-part suite which moves from
throbbing minimalism to expansive song-craft to ecstatic free-rock. His previous
solo albums for Touch exhibited a clear progression towards augmenting and
embellishing his signature bass-heavy guitar tones with fragile acoustic
instrumentation. Audience of One, while also existing in clear continuity with
these recordings, opens the next chapter.

Remarkable in its confidence and breadth, but also in the sensuous immediacy of
its details, this is the first time a single record has come close to
encapsulating Ambarchi’s musical personality in its full range and singularity.
The techniques and strategies developed in his refined improvisational work with
Keith Rowe and his explorations of the outer limits of rock with Sunn O))) and
Keiji Haino are both in evidence, alongside the meticulous attention to detail
and composition of his solo works. And on the cover of Ace Frehley’s ‘Fractured
Mirror’ which closes the record, Ambarchi even points to his roots as a classic
rock fanatic, in an epic yet faithful version which extends the shimmering
guitar patters of the original into a rich field of phase patters reminiscent of
the classic American minimalism of Reich and Riley.

The album features a multitude of collaborators, who, far from appearing in
incidental roles, are integral to the pieces on which they perform: on ‘Salt’,
Ambarchi paints a hypnotic, chiming backdrop for Paul Duncan’s (Warm Ghost)
vocals, and Joe Talia’s virtuoso drumming and driving cymbals are at the core of
the epic ‘Knots’, in which Ambarchi, alongside a chamber arrangement by Eyvind
Kang, weaves a net of frequencies and textures with the organic push and pull of
a 70s psych jam, the bass response of a doom metal ritual and the
psycho-acoustic precision of an Alvin Lucier composition.

On his previous records, Ambarchi’s signature guitar tone was the ever-present
bedrock over which other elements sounded. At moments on Audience of One, this
disappears entirely, as on the beautiful ‘Passage’, which, recalling the 70’s
Italian non-academic minimalism of Roberto Cacciapaglia and Giusto Pio, is
composed of overlapping tones from Hammond organ and wine glasses, Jessika
Kenneys voice, various acoustic instruments, and the delicate amplified
textures of Canadian sound-artist Crys Cole. Rather than being provided by any
particular sound, the unified feel of Audience to One stems simply from the
unique, patient sensibility Ambarchi has developed over the last twenty years;
abstracting musical forms into their barest forms, while somehow always managing
to leave their emotive power intact. [Francis Plagne]